to scold you after that—poor child, I reckon you were only eight or nine years old, and boy-like thought you’d follow in your father’s footsteps and that everything would be all right.”
“Yes,” said Gant, with the faint grin again, “I kept stretchin’my legs to put my feet down in his tracks—it was all I could do to keep up with him…. Ah, Lord,” he said, and in a moment said in a faint low voice, “how well I can remember it. That was just the winter before he died.”
“And you’ve had that old clock ever since,” Eliza said. “That very clock upon the mantel, sir—at least, you’ve had it ever since I’ve known you, and I reckon you had it long before that—for I know you told me how you brought it South with you. And that clock must be all of sixty or seventy years old—if it’s a day.”
“Yes,” said Gant, “it’s all of that.”
And again he was silent, and lay so still and motionless that there was no sound in the room except his faint and laboured breathing, the languid stir of the curtains in the cool night breeze, and the punctual tocking of the old wooden clock. And presently, when she thought that he might have gone off to sleep again, he spoke, in the same remote and detached voice as before:
“Eliza,”—he said—and at the sound of that unaccustomed word, a name he had spoken only twice in forty years—her white face and her worn brown eyes turned toward him with the quick and startled look of an animal—“Eliza,” he said quietly, “you have had a hard life with me, a hard time. I want to tell you that I’m sorry.”
And before she could move from her white stillness of shocked surprise, he lifted his great right hand and put it gently down across her own. And for a moment she sat there bolt upright, shaken, frozen, with a look of terror in her eyes, her heart drained of blood, a pale smile trembling uncertainly and foolishly on her lips. Then she tried to withdraw her hand with a clumsy movement, she began to stammer with an air of ludicrous embarrassment, she bridled, saying—“Aw-w, now, Mr. Gant. Well, now, I reckon,”—and suddenly these few simple words of regret and affection did what all the violence, abuse, drunkenness and injury of forty years had failed to do. She wrenched her hand free like a wounded creature, her face was suddenly contorted by that grotesque and pitiable grimace of sorrow that women have had in moments of grief since the beginning of time, and digging her fist into her closed eye quickly with the pathetic gesture of a child, she lowered her head and wept bitterly.
